Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Can Word-Names Replace Numbers as Stat Values?
Some games reject the idea of having numbers for stats and give the stats word-names instead. Thus intead of saying 'Michael's Sword skill is 10' we might instead say 'Michael's Sword skill is Excellent' or 'Michael is an Excellent Swordsman'. The idea is to get away from an artificial-sounding set of numbers, which you have to know the system to be able to interpret, and to replace them with recognisable words. That way even a complete newcomer to the system could easily see what a character's ability levels were in real terms.

This is a noble ideal and I went through a period of trying to write game systems that lived up to it. I found that in its pure form there were some problems.

HOW MANY LEVELS CAN YOU HAVE?

A word-name stat system must be clear. Its purpose is to convey more clearly numbers would how good someone is at something. This effectively limits the number of levels of stat that you can have in the game. A system with the levels below would be clear:

Very Poor, Poor, Below Average, Average, Above Average, Good, Very Good.

It's immediately obvious what order those levels go in. Comparing two characters, it's clear that one with Good in a stat is a bit better than one with Above Average. But I don't see how to add any more levels without making such comparisons unclear. I've seen games that have terribly unclear levels, something like the following:

Very Poor, Poor, Below Average, Average, Above Average, Good, Excellent, Wonderful, Superb, Brilliant, Marvellous.

This is ridiculous. There's no way of knowing, without knowing the system, whether Excellent is higher or lower than Superb, or Marvellous higher or lower than Wonderful. This is a mockery of the original principle - it is less clear, not clearer, than having a string of numbers.

The first, clear system which I described covers primary stats well (Strength etc.) with seven levels - including four from average to the highest possible. Skills are a different matter, because the concept of 'average' skill level is a bit more difficult to pin down. Imagine a society where most people are peasant farmers. They don't really have much fighting skill. The lords above them are warriors. If I had to stat these people on a scale of 1-7, I'd give the typical peasant a combat skill of about 2 with the average knight about 4-5. If we map my original seven stat levels onto these, we get a peasant at skill level Poor and a knihght at Average or Above Average. Does that make any sense? An average (ie. typical - average in the modal sense) individual is the peasant, so we should call the lowest level but one 'average'. A more sensible skill level distribution would be something like this:

Unskilled, Dabbler, Hack, Competent, Master, Grand Master, Supreme Grand Master.

This gives us a clear ranking of who is best at what, and a feel for the place of as given skill level within the hierarchy of abilities. It's clear from the titles that someone with a Competent skill level could make a living at it, while a Master would be high-ranking among preofessionals in that dicipline; Grand Master and Supreme Grand Master would be reserved for the greatest practitioners in the world.

Going back to our peasants and knights above, level two in combat skill corresponds to a Dabbler (the average peasant has been in a few brawls but that's all) while the knight is Competent or Master - a skilled professional in the art of fighting.

Once again, I find it impossible to squeeze any more levels into this system without the order becoming ambiguous. For instance, if we added 'Expert' it might be unclear to the casual observer whether this was better or worse than 'Master'.

CONTROLLING LEVELS

Once you've got these levels into your game, you have to keep some kind of control over them. It's important to have a clear understanding of the distribution of ability levels in your gameworld and avoid uncontrolled stat level growth, which are both discussed in depth in the two essays just linked.

The problem with a lot of roleplaying games is that they let a character's stats increase at a ridiculous rate to a ridiculously high level (often there is no upper limit). Now these word-name game systems have a built-in upper limit, because the levels only go up to a certain point. But that upper limit is the maximum possible stat level for a person in this world - Supreme Grand Master level, which should be reserved only for a few very skilled individuals. If you give out experience points which let your players buy their characters' Combat Skill up to Supreme Grand Master, then they will. Then you'll end up with a bunch of characters running around with the highest possible Combat Skill in the world. You'll then have to give them worthy enemies to fight, who are themsleves Supreme Grand Masters. It will end up as a game of maximum-statted character, which would be awful.

The solution is to make it easy enough for player characters to get to be Competent, difficult for them to become Master, and effectively impossible for them to become Grand Master or above. This way you always have a couple of levels spare to have opponents who are above the PCs' level - the Emperor's elite guard will be made up of Grand Master level troops, for instance, so the PCs won't be able to just walk in and assassinate him. I sum it us like this:

If you can't stat Bruce Lee, there's something wrong with your game.

Bruce Lee is that one NPC who will always be harder than you player characters, because he is the combat monster of the world.

FINE GRADATIONS

So here's a game as I've outlined it so far. It's a pseudo-mediaeval fantasy world. Primary stats have these levels:
Very Poor, Poor, Below Average, Average, Above Average, Good, Very Good. Skills have the levels:
Unskilled, Dabbler, Hack, Competent, Master, Grand Master, Supreme Grand Master. An average peasant is a Dabbler in Combat. A warrior knight would be Competent or Master in Combat. The Emperor's bodyguards are Grand Masters. That mysterious masked stranger is a Supreme Grand Master.

Combat works pretty much like this: two characters with equal skill levels in Combat are equally matched. A character who exceeds another by one level is pretty likely to defeat that opponent, though there is some chance of the lower-skilled character winning. With a difference of two or more levels, the chances of the lower-skilled character winning are very slim.

Where does this leave player characters? I'd set it up so that you can create characters with Combat skill levels from Dabbler (average peasant skill level) to Competent (the level of a reasonable professional soldier). Over time (with experience points, if you use them, or by whatever other method of stat change you use), a character's Combat skill level can rise to Master but no higher.

When you create character who's a fighter, you're going to want to make him Competent in Combat, or at the very least a Hack. No-one would settle for a warrior character who was a Dabbler at Combat - and this is a game where people are going to be playing figthing characters (it's hack-fantasy). So most people will make their characters Competent.

This way, you'll end up with a game where most of the characters have the same skill level in Combat: Competent. A few will be one level lower, at Hack. With experience, a Competent character may rise to the Master level - a rise of one level - and that's it. At that point, advancemeentt is over. With a character who starts at Hack, you can go up a whole two levels, then it's all over for you. I know a lot of players who would find that all rather dull.

It also means there's no fine gradation between characters. Starting characters will mostly be equal in skill, at Competent. A party of seasoned characters will mostly be equal, at Master. There won't be any room for discerning which character is the hardest - the fine gradations don't exist in the game system. These can only be added by putting more stat levels in the game - but that isn't practical while still keeping a system of word-name levels that's clear.

OTHER RACES AND CREATURES

The primary stat system set out above deals with humans. Now in this game world there's a race called Elves. They have higher Agility than humans - their spread of Agility levels is two points higher than that of humans. Thus elven average is the same stat level as the human Good. The maximum Agility for an Elf is two level above the human maximum. This means that two new stat levels have to be created, which might take some rewriting of your game system (depending on how it works). You could give the stats names like this:

Human stat level	Elven stat level
-	Very Good
-	Good
Very Good	Above Average
Good	Average
Above Average	Below Average
Average	Poor
Below Average	Very Poor
Poor	-
Very Poor	-

Thus an elven stat of Average corresponds in ability to a human stat of Good. This would make the game very confusing, as two characters could have 'Average' written on their character sheets but have completely different stat levels. It would also mean that you would have to relate every race's stats to every other race's. You would have to know how 'Average rabbit Strength', 'Average orc Strength', 'Average bull Strength', 'Average ogre Strength' and 'Average dragon Strength' correspond to one another. This would be made much easier by just giving the stats numbers.

The other alternative is to create new stat levels, much like this:

Superhuman 2

Superhuman 1

Very Good

Good

Above Average

Average

Below Average

Poor

Very Poor

This could be infinitely expanded by simply adding numbers: the average ogre has Strength Superhuman 20, the average Dragon Superhuman 200. This is fine but it goes back to having numbers for stats - and if you're going to do that, why abandon them in the first place?

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

I think the best way is to have numbers and word-names. Numbers are clear in game terms while word-names are clear in real-world terms. To allow fine levels of gradation, I'd have each word-name spanning several number values. The system might work like this:

Combat Skill	Word-name
61-70	Supreme Grand Master (absolute human maximum)
51-60	Grand Master
41-50	Master (PC maximum)
31-40	Competent
21-30	Hack
11-20	Dabbler (average peasant ability)
10 or less	Unskilled

A difference of 20 points in Combat Skill makes it almost impossible for the lower-skilled character to beat the higher-skilled (all other circumstances being equal). Under this system we could easily say that a typical ogre (a 12 foot high beastie with dreadful claws and teeth) has Combat Skill 60, so a human Grand Master stands some chance of defeating it and a human Supreme Grand Master is likely to defeat it, though it won't be a complete pushover. A typical dragon has Combat Skill 1,000 - so no human is ever going to stand a chance against it. Once you have the numbers there, it's easy to put these things into a single, easily understandable scale.

On a character sheet in the Combat Skill section, you write the number and the word-name, eg. 36 Competent. In character creation, allow people to make characters with Combat Skill up to about 35. Thus characters can start off Competent but still have a way to go before reaching Master. The maximum that PCs can achieve is 50, and that takes a long long time. So characters will slowly inch toward that distant goal of Combat Skill 50 - let them only gain 1 point at a time - and each point gained will seem like a success. There will be enough difference between characters that they won't all seem the same.